Mar 05, 2006

Now I can already hear some of you early adopters out there
justifying your purchase. “Yeah, but my set looks great.”
Or “How can you be influenced so much by a magazine?”
Well, IÕm also influenced by my eyes, and what I’ve seen has not been great.
Colors vary, blacks are blackish, response times can be slow and viewing angles
- letÕs just say youÕd better have a lot of room directly in front of the set.

He’s right.

Flat panels (be they plasmas or LCD’s) just don’t have
the same picture quality as CRTs. I’ve been struggling over this
for a while - I was looking to buy a flat panel TV as a Christmas
present, and I was so frustrated by the picture quality of even high-end
flat panels.

In the end, I went with a 19-inch screen because the flat panel
does have at least one real advantage over a CRT: their lighter weight
gives consumers more options for placement. In my case, the 19-inch
LCD replaced a 12-inch CRT on a small kitchen shelf. A larger
CRT wasn’t practical for that spot because the shelf wouldn’t have
been able to support the weight, but the LCD worked perfectly.

Stereophile has given their
take on
iPod culture as exemplified by Apple’s
new Hi-Fi, speaker system:

But wait, hard-core audiophiles might say (have said), a single
unit with two full-range drivers and a small subwoofer driver
won’t offer U-R-There quality. Wouldn’t a larger system be more
faithful to the source? Wouldn’t a wireless dock that allowed you to
carry the iPod around with you offer more immediate control?
These are valid pointsÑbut I suspect they are nevertheless beside the
pointÑor that they might be evolutionary developments that will
come to pass, now that people are rethinking what they want out of a
music delivery system.

I am glad that the article points out that the iPod is capable of playing
uncompressed and losslessly compressed music. While many audiophiles
(including me) have been critical of the wide acceptances of lossy-compressed
music, it’s good to know that as the storage capacity of portable
players increase, so does the ability to store large libraries of
quality digital music.